Vote up?

But why overload ASCII characters with unrelated meanings, just to make them appear as icons (even if you are trying to hide them, screen readers etc are starting to show generated text too).
This is what the Unicode private use area is for – use it.
Also, maybe time to re-examine your opinion that SVG support is ‘patchy’.
Claimer – involved in the development of PNG, CSS. SVG and WOFF.